These days I am receiving quite a few interesting referrals of security guards who have been traumatised as victims of robberies. What I am finding is really fascinating; it is that when I begin to give healing to them, I quite often find that their aura is not so much in their physical bodies and they have "hidden" themselves energetically elsewhere. Not surprising, having found themselves at the business end of a gun being wielded by an aggressively yelling bank robber. My task is first to find a tiny remnant of their aura (human energy field) and attempt to coax it back and align it with their physical body. When I mentioned this to one of my clients, he became very animated and said yes, he had indeed felt very "absent" and found himself frequently "somewhere else." As he is recovering, he can feel the healing energy flowing again now when I work. Interestingly also, one of my clients has studied martial arts for many years and I am finding that there are many parallels between my advice and the advice of his Sensei. There is nothing new under the sun, is there? The good stuff appears in so many different cultures under different guises. When we work with the quality of a person's present consciousness, and the usefulness also of altered states of consciousness, I find that Buddhism especially has much to offer. The practice of mindfulness is particularly pertinent to much of our spiritual understandings.

This afternoon my mother, Mona, comes back from Leeds after having spent a week up there in our home town sitting Shiva (mourning) for her younger brother, Ronnie, may his dear soul rest in peace, who has died aged 85 years. At 88 years, Mona is still going strong, surrounded by a loving family and lively group of friends, with a hectic social and intellectual life. She is devastated at the loss of Ronnie, but knew that she has in reality been mourning for the loss of him for a good few years as senility gradually claimed his mind. In Eternal Sparrow I have included a poem written whilst Mona herself was fighting for life a couple of years ago in the Whittington Hospital. The poem is sparse, stark, because I could hardly breathe myself at the time. Her doctors were asking me to decide whether to switch off her life support system, and I had decided not to agree to that. Luckily that was the right decision but, at the time, I didn't know whether I was making it for selfish reasons. I wasn't prepared to take responsibility for my mother's death, and wanted her to stay even if she emerged from her three week coma (following emergency six hour surgery) with brain damage.

Her present love of life and thrill of every new day is a constant relief to me, as you can imagine. I am profoundly grateful to all those spiritual healers in my Soul Therapy circle who joined with her medical team and me in helping to save her life.